Archive

Yes, I know that I wrote a goodbye post to this series earlier this year, but what can I say, events in the last few weeks have conspired to bring this back from the dead (pun firmly intended). I’ll talk about the biggest one now.

White Wolf has surprised the gaming world by announcing a very special project to be published later this year, the Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, to be released at the Grand Masquerade in September.

Yesterday I was supposed to be studying for a Psychology test but I could not concentrate. In letting my mind empty for a few moments to see if I could get in the study zone, it instead wandered over to my past, to the late 90s, to Vampire: The Masquerade. This isn’t out of nowhere; recently I’ve been talking to Rich Rogers of the Canon Puncture Show (the GM in my recent Lady Blackbird game) about Vampire: The Masquerade. He was also a huge fan of the game and ran a long chronicle around the same time I did. I told him it would be fun to revisit that game with the tools and techniques we have learned since for more story-driven style of play and he agreed. We’re kicking it around and maybe we’ll do something with that in the future (maybe Megacon, if I manage to go?).

Vampire. That game still has a hold on me even though I haven’t played in about a decade. It was my first foray into personal stakes in a roleplaying game, even if I was crude about achieving that, if I ever did. Read more…

It’s no secret to anyone that knows me that I would love to have a career in the Hobby Gaming industry. The sole reason why I started Highmoon Media Productions and the podcasts was to build credits and “get my name out there.” It’s turned out that I’ve greatly enjoyed doing what I do, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want a more steady kind of job for a gaming company.

I’ve been a huge fan of White Wolf games for years, and during the late 90s/early 2000s these were THE de-facto games played at my home, with Vampire and Changeling holding court as royal consorts. Thus why for the longest time my dream gaming job was at White Wolf, doing heavens-knows-what, but doing it at White Wolf. These days I’m a bit out of touch with their games (the reset hit me hard, even if I greatly enjoy the new World of Darkness), but yeah, that freehold in Atlanta still holds a certain charm for me.Which leads me to the title of this post.

If there is one person right now in the gaming industry whose job I thoroughly envy, that person would be Eddy Webb, Director of Alternative Publishing for White Wolf/CCP North America. Why, you ask? Because what that somewhat-vague title means is that Eddy is the guy who’s in charge of dealing with all new and emergent ways of publishing/marketing the products at White Wolf, from practically-mainstream-by-now PDF publishing to the new (and really good) White Wolf Blogcast hosted by Eddy himself (basically everything beyond Gutenberg’s legacy).

As you probably know, I do The Digital Front Podcast (no, it hasn’t podfaded and yes, it will return sometime this year), a show I started precisely because I am a part of that Alternative Publishing field via Highmoon Games, and because the subject interests me to no end, even if I have trouble keeping up with all the latest developments. It is these alternative publishing methods that allowed me and hundreds like me to get our gaming projects out there via PDF, that allowed the rise of the indie games movement thanks to Print on Demand, that created a whole new class of media with blogging and podcasting, and that stands poised to give us the very next awesome development in the way games are produced, distributed and consumed (I offer the iPhone and Kindle as two common examples). And being in charge of getting the most out of this explosion in the service of his company and the gamut of great games they put out, that’s Eddy’s job!

So Eddy, when I say I envy you it’s because, as I see it, you have the coolest job in the industry right now, and from what I’ve seen coming out from White Wolf in the AP department, you are doing it hella-well. Be forewarned, as soon as I am able to get The Digital Front back up and running, I’m gunning for you as a guest. Expect that email sometime down the line.

As I’m writing this, first drafts have already started trickling in for the tentatively-titled New Wave Requiem, which is a historical book for playing Vampire in 1980s America — think of it as Requiem for Rome meets Miami Vice.

The jokes have already been made that the game should only go up to 1989, when a breach in the Masquerade happened with the release of a book called Vampire: The Masquerade (this only makes sense if you read/played Victorian Age Vampire, where the setting went all the way to 1889, when a breach in the Masquerade happened with the release of a book called Dracula). Personally, I’m all for it. 🙂

I’ve put up my collection of Arcadia: The Wyld Hunt CCG up for sale on eBay. You can see the listing here.

This game was published in the early- to mid-90’s by White Wolf tied to their Changeling: The Dreaming roleplaying game. It features adventures played in the fae realm of Arcadia. The game was sold in booster packs divided into Character Packs and Story Packs. To play, you select a character card, then customize it with options from the Character Pack. Once that’s done, you create a playing field by laying down terrain cards. A Quest is selected, enemies and traps are laid down under various terrain cards, and off you go to complete the Quest.

Included in this lot are two card boxes, one all Character Pack cards (including the nifty, stand-up cardboard characters), and one all Story Pack cards. These cards were used in games, but are all in excellent shape. All cards are from the Wyld Hunt set.

This was cool game, but suffered from the way it was marketed. White Wolf tried to ride the CCG train, but this game would have done so much better if packaged as a boardgame with regular expansions. Even today, if I could get it complete in one box, it would be a brilliant little game.